STATE HOUSE ROUNDUP -- Broken promise spurs Rosenberg downfall

By Matt Murphy STATE HOUSE NEWS SERVICE

Monday

May 7, 2018 at 9:30 AMMay 7, 2018 at 1:30 PM

Troubling. Damning. Incredibly disturbing. Pick an adjective and it was probably used last week to describe the all-the-above Ethics Committee report that ultimately toppled former Senate President Stanley Rosenberg.

A recap and analysis of the week in state government.

Troubling. Damning. Incredibly disturbing.

Pick an adjective and it was probably used last week to describe the all-the-above Ethics Committee report that ultimately toppled former Senate President Stanley Rosenberg. For all of the alarming incidents laid out in the report, however, it was something far more basic in the end that proved to be Rosenberg's undoing -- a broken promise.

Rosenberg, the 68-year-old, first openly gay president of the Senate, resigned May 3 after a more-than-30-year career in the Legislature under intense pressure from fellow senators, the governor and the attorney general to wash clean the stain that has darkened the State House for months.

The resignation, with an echo of defiance and a dash of bitterness, followed the release, at long last, of the $230,000 report into Rosenberg and whether he should shoulder any of the blame for the meddlesome and possibly criminal behavior of his husband.

If every politician who ever broke a promise was forced to resign from office, there probably wouldn't be enough people to run the government. But as he sat on the cusp of becoming the most-powerful senator in Massachusetts in 2014, Rosenberg made a pledge to his colleagues and they trusted him.

Rosenberg said there would be a firewall between his then-boyfriend Bryon Hefner and the Senate. And that firewall wasn't just an insurance policy, but something born out of concerns already shared by members of the Senate that Hefner's behavior could become problematic. It did.

In 77 pages of uncomfortable detail, the independent investigators from the law firm Hogan Lovells laid out a laundry list of ways that Hefner had overstepped into Senate business by contacting staff and emailing under his husband's name, hurling racial epithets at a staff member and, according to five of the 45 witnesses, crossing a physical line that include unwanted sexual touching.

Rosenberg didn't do any of those things and he probably didn't know about the most egregious, but he knew enough, investigators and the Ethics Committee concluded, that his inability to protect the Senate from his husband was a dereliction of duty.

The firewall, they said, was "non-existent."

It was that breach of trust, and the consequences that stemmed from Rosenberg's inability to maintain a line of demarcation between his two lives, that led to seven Democrats publicly calling for Rosenberg to quit, and many more probably harboring similar feelings that they kept to themselves.

Rosenberg, in the end, made it easy on them by resigning, but in doing so he wanted everyone to remember that he broke no rules and was not found to have let Hefner influence any Senate business. And that, according to Rosenberg, was all the firewall was ever intended to be.

Needless to say, everything else that happened last week got blotted out by the Rosenberg affair like a total eclipse. But that doesn't mean that in the shadows, nothing happened.

In an unfortunate bit of timing for House Speaker Robert DeLeo, the Winthrop Democrat scheduled a major gun announcement at the same time senators gathered behind closed doors to review copies of the ethics report.

Though his announcement may have been overshadowed for the day, it won't be that way for long. DeLeo gathered students and activists to Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School to give the green light to a "red flag" gun bill. A green light from DeLeo essentially means that a bill will pass the House, and the vote to do that will apparently happen this month.

The legislation, which gathered steam following the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, would allow relatives, roommates or law enforcement to petition the courts to bar someone from possessing a firearm if their gun ownership presents a "significant danger" to themselves or others.

Supporters say the measure will save lives, but gun rights groups loathe the concept as one that tramples on their due process rights and turns a blind eye to the real problem underlying gun violence and mass shootings -- mental illness.

While DeLeo said yes to the "red flag" bill, he said probably not to another major piece of legislation that some lawmakers hoped to get done this year. The so-called Safe Communities Act, which would restrict cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration agents, appears to be going nowhere.

DeLeo said the bill lacks consensus in the House, and therefore he doesn't feel compelled to bring the bill to the floor for a vote, despite the governor, liberal and conservative members of the Legislature all pushing for some type of action to occur.

The result, however, is that for now it appears the Supreme Judicial Court's Lunn decision will remain the law of the commonwealth, barring local police from holding anyone wanted by Immigration and Customs unless they have another reason to do so.

Baker may have to take the loss on immigration enforcement, but things are looking up for his opioid abuse prevention bill.

The Committee on Mental Health and Substance Use Prevention recommended a redrafted version of the governor's bill last week that included a version of his three-day hold provision, which Democrats roundly dismissed last session.

Baker can now focus on getting that bill and others across the finish line, because he won't be at all distracted by the demands of a re-election campaign. That's because he doesn't really plan to acknowledge that he has a re-election campaign until at least August.

Despite drawing a primary challenge from conservative anti-gay pastor Scott Lively, Baker told reporters last week not to expect to see him rev his trail motor until after July. Needless to say, he doesn't seem too worried about Lively.

"I think it's unlikely you'll see me do much other than my job between now and the end of this session," Baker said.

Rep. Nick Collins knows what it's like to not have to campaign too hard and cruise into a seat.

After Rep. Evandro Carvalho switched his focus to the Suffolk district attorney's race, Collins faced only nominal opposition and waltzed into First Suffolk Senate seat May 1 in a special election, the last of the year.

That hasn't stopped the departures, however. Obviously, Rosenberg's resignation will leave his vast western Massachusetts district unrepresented during crunch time on Beacon Hill, but the House lost another one last week.

Rep. Chris Walsh, of Framingham, died May 2 after several years of battling cancer, the second state representative to pass away in as many weeks and the fifth legislator to die in office this session.